South Jersey Theater On Facebook's Small Business Council
By Melony Roy
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - A South Jersey theatre will be taking a special trip to Facebook's headquarters in California after being selected to be on its inaugural council for small business.
The Eagle Theatre in Hammonton is one of Facebook's most successful small business advertisers. It will join 11 other business representatives at Facebook's Menlo Park headquarters for its first Small and Medium Business Council.
Co-artistic director of the theater, Ed Corsi says, "We started directing money in the budget toward it. We did paid ads, a lot of promoted posts, and tried to tie into our website and really pushed our event with paid ads and mixed in with some fun cartoons and general interest posts to drive more viewers and traffic to our page."
Like most small businesses, the theatre uses Facebook's self-service advertising platform to promote posts in their fans' newsfeeds or to invite fans to like their business pages.
"For us the best return on investment has been the combination of -- we just sent out a 100,000 piece mailer all in our area and we followed it up with targeted ads. It was absolutely hands down the best thing we've done so far."
Facebook's SMB Council will serve terms of six months to a year. The members will advise the company on the development of their tools and Facebook will provide feedback and support.